The Rose Trilogy
by Kathryn Shadow
Summary: Black roses signify death, hatred, or farewell, but can also mean slavish devotion, the overcoming of a long, hard journey, rejuvenation, or rebirth.' Dark!reunion!fic. Chibi!evil!Rose's idea. She's giggling smugly in the corner if you want her.
1. Chapter 1

Yeah, that helped. I finish one story, I start three more. -bangs head on desk- I'll be the death of me one day.

**Disclaimer: **Of course I own Doctor Who. And those aren't the droids you're looking for.

SIAPNIAN: Yes, I have a thing for dark!fic.

-BAD WOLF-

_Black roses signify death, hatred, or farewell, but can also mean slavish devotion, the overcoming of a long, hard journey, rejuvenation, or rebirth._

-BAD WOLF-

Something fell to Earth.

This in itself wasn't unusual. Things fell to Earth practically every day. Most of them were bits of rock and such. The occasional spaceship also made an appearance.

What was unusual about the object was that it was... well, it was an inherently unusual object.

It wasn't much to look at; a twisted lump of metal from the hull of a Time Agent's spaceship, which had been destroyed from a fatal computer malfunction initiated in a battle. The lump was so mangled and so hull-like that no-one could have recognised that it might have been the sort of thing that one should not, under any circumstances, touch.

The spaceship, heavily damaged from the battle, had been halfway into the Vortex when it malfunctioned, and halfway out when it finally blew up above Earth— the Time Agent knew about Torchwood, knew that that was the safest place for him to stay and the most likely place to be able to repair his ship without getting killed or worse. The fragments of the spaceship fell to the planet. Most of them were burned in descent, but that one remnant managed to survive... and landed rather impressively in an alleyway in London, where it was picked up three hours later by Torchwood One.

-BAD WOLF-

"What have you got?" asked Rose Tyler as she came into view, leaning on a random desk when she stopped and looked up at Jake.

"That spaceship which blew up earlier today?" some random guy whose name Rose could never remember prompted. Rose nodded her acknowledgement. "This is all that's left."

"Found it in an alley, can't figure out what it is," chimed in Jake. "So we thought you might."

Rose touched it hesitantly, and energy burned into her. She yelped and removed her hand, tingling as if she had been mildly electrocuted.

"Didn't do that before," said Some Random Guy.

Rose tapped it again, but it behaved itself, so she picked it up. It was interesting only because of how convoluted it was, both from its descent through the atmosphere and the other things it had gone through before Torchwood found it. It might have been vaguely curved at some point in its life, but it was so twisted and damaged that it was difficult to tell. It was rough, pocked, scorched in most places. In those places where it wasn't burnt, it was a dull, metallic grey.

Rose frowned at it, failed to figure out what it was by looking, and shrugged. "What the hell," she muttered, and licked it.

She grimaced abruptly and scraped the sleeve of her coat across her tongue to erase the flavour. "Got fried, whatever it is," she concluded, a disgusted look still imprinted on her face.

"Did you just _lick _it?" demanded Some Random Guy.

She glanced up. "Yeah. So?"

"Why—"

"Can we get back to the point?" snapped Jake irritably.

Rose straightened up, putting the lump of metal back where it had been. "It's safe," she said. "Probably."

And she walked away, blissfully unaware of the reaction which started thrumming through her veins.

-BAD WOLF-

Things only halfway out of the Vortex aren't supposed to be touched for a reason. Such things aren't quite in the real world and they don't quite follow the laws of physics; time and space bend and hover and tangle around it like a naturally clumsy individual suddenly discovering an invisible chair in their way. Whatever touches those things only adds to Time and Space's confusion and makes them mess up even more, and then bad things happen.

Anything that time-travels is steeped in background radiation, which is perfectly safe under normal circumstances. As long as you aren't directly exposed to the Vortex for more than a split second, it's safe and can't hurt you beyond a headache and some nausea, as temporal radiation is very similar to normal radiation.

Objects which are halfway in and halfway out of the Vortex, however, are the temporal equivalent of plutonium. The radiation can't kill you by itself, but it does mess things up quite a bit; random tumours which had previously been benign and dying will suddenly grow, viruses are initiated and take over with remarkable speed or are completely destroyed, ageing occurs either far more quickly or more slowly than it should...

Its effect on Rose was unique, but not unsurprising, considering the circumstances.

Years before, she had touched something else she shouldn't have, and the something else took the opportunity to steal her existing background radiation from her so it could heal itself. It also accidentally got some of her genetic code and, fuelled by the radiation, the code rapidly took over.

But genetic transfers— especially those under circumstances such as the ones detailed— are rarely one-way and difficult, if not impossible, to reverse...

-BAD WOLF-

_It was so cold, but it was good to be cold. It was dark and cold and pure Inside, where she sat curled into herself: a willing captive of her perfect prison. Her single blue eye swivelled around as numbers swarmed across her vision, her one contact with the Outside telling her that there was something Different nearby._

_She turned the rest of her metal exoskeleton, glided easily across the floor, the picture of malevolent perfection. The creature Outside stood tall and just stared sadly at her. She was confused that it didn't run or gibber in fear, as the others had, and this gave her pause as her mechanical eye zoomed in on his face._

_"Rose," he murmured. She flinched at the reminder of what she had been Before: a corrupt, impure creature, divided against herself, wanting what she could never have and dreaming that someday the man who stood before her now would return. She remembered that she had loved him Then, when she was still impure enough to love; now she saw that he was Different and he could destroy her with a touch, and she had to destroy him first._

_"Doctor," she acknowledged. Her voice was harsh and mechanical, still with that hint of femininity which betrayed her original heritage. Her fellows had been kind to allow her into their number; a creature like them who looked Different enough to destroy. But they hadn't. And she would be forever grateful._

_"Rose," he repeated more urgently, stepping forwards, and she backed away._

_"Ex-ter-min—"_

"Rose!"

Rose jerked awake, rolled over sharply and stood up in one fluid motion, panting with fear.

"You all right?" inquired her mother.

Rose opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. "Yeah," she said, but her heart still pounded sharply in her chest with terror: terror from one side because of what she had dreamt; terror on the other because she had left it behind, and now she remembered she was human and therefore Different.

She wanted to crawl back into her shell.

But there was no shell.

She was Outside, impure, and unsafe.

And she was terrified.

-BAD WOLF-

By the way, I've got a Livejournal now. No idea what to do with it, but I've got one. thelosttimelady (dot) livejournal (dot) com, if anyone's interested.

Reviews keep authors happy and fed!


	2. Chapter 2

Hello, I'm back! Did you miss me? -cheeky grin- ...No? Awws. -is sad now- -wanders off to cry-

**Disclaimer:** Mum's plotting to send _Alternatively _to the BBC (no idea why), but that doesn't help my chances of owning Doctor Who.

SIAPNIAN: All right, so this... thing has grown far bigger than I ever imagined and has turned itself into a series. I'm blaming this on you. I don't know how it's your fault; I just know that it is. Shame on you. -shames-

-BAD WOLF-

Shaking, she put the terror down to nothing but an unexpected side-effect of a bad dream. She unconsciously dressed herself in the most concealing clothes she had and practically slunk to Torchwood.

Once there, the terror and the need to be Inside started to fade as she twirled absently around in her chair for a moment. It was a slow day. A particularly slow day. A slug would be impressed at the sheer tedium and sloth.

Rose grimaced unconsciously and twirled around in her chair again, patiently ignoring the dreadfully important something-or-other on her computer screen. She hated slugs. They were slimy and squishy and made the most disgusting noises (not to mention oozing all over the place) when you crushed them and they were just so... _sluglike._

The whiteness of the dreadfully important something-or-other looked calmly back at her, angular text covering half of its blank expanse. She sighed and rested her forehead against the coolness of the desk, wishing (not for the first time) that she could be in Torchwood Three instead of One. Torchwood Three got to do all the fun stuff. But no, she was invaluable, so they just chained her up in here where there was only an alien invasion once a month or so. The occasional lost, confused hitchhiker definitely did not count as "alien activity", no matter what the newbies said.

She heard footsteps and snapped her head back up, glaring studiously at the screen. The characters seemed to meld into one another and she lazily imagined them seeping through the screen and wrapping her up in a shell, a cold and dark shell of grey. Bronze. A shell would be nice. Nothing could hurt her if she had a shell.

She shook herself. Not that anything would try to hurt her anyway, she thought sulkily. Not that anything happened that bloody Mickey and Whatshisname— Jake— didn't get to first because apparently she was the expert and was only to be used for emergencies. She hated that. Wasn't her experience _there _to be useful? How could it be, when...

Something angular and metal was placed before her. She glanced at it, then up at Matt.

"It's your turn," he said by way of explanation.

She unconsciously scooted a little bit away from him, glancing at the metal and then back up. He was still too close, so she curled into herself a little bit, folding her legs up to her chest.

"What do you mean, it's my turn?"

"It's a puzzle," he said. "Apparently when all the bits are slotted together in the correct configuration, it forms an almost perfect model of a... what's it called..." He paused. "Glaznee...?"

"Glazsinine?"

"Yeah."

She glanced down at the lump of interconnected triangles and saw that this could, in fact, happen. Maybe if that bit was over there, it would make more sense. Her fingers twitched slightly, but she didn't touch it.

"And you're giving this to me... why?"

"All the new Torchwood people are given it for a couple of months. If you complete it, something happens." He smiled slightly. "Not sure what the something is, as no-one's managed to do it yet."

The situation might have been faintly humorous, but she just nodded and picked up the puzzle, eyes flickering over it.

Her tongue poked out from between her lips as she studied the little triangular bits of metal, connected with what appeared to be strips of duct tape rolled into slender cylinders, and the arrangement made some sort of sense. She heard Matt's footsteps fade away, but she paid him no heed. Experimentally she slid two of the pieces against each other; they slotted together with a satisfying clunking noise and the puzzle instantly made just a little more sense than it had a few seconds beforehand.

She grinned her triumph, calculations flitting through her mind as she tried to figure out what to do next. Fold that over, put it in there, and there was one angular, vestigial wing. Slot that in there, and there was the bony tail. Twist it around, and the neck began to form.

Fifteen minutes later she grinned as she put the last two pieces together and put the little model fish-bird-horse-thing on her desk before proceeding to spin around again.

She should probably finish that dreadfully important thing. She sighed and reluctantly started typing, absentmindedly listing the characteristics, species, traditions and basic history of the planet Sto.

_There _was a planet she didn't miss. Bloody _Titanic._

Finished with that task, she tapped the desk absently for five minutes and forty-three seconds before getting bored and going home.

She dreamt about life inside the shell and the melody of dying screams.

-BAD WOLF-

The next day, she started fiddling. Life was too still, too normal. She hated this planet, needed to get offworld and she knew that she wouldn't be able to just hitchhike on the next ship. Not without eliminating whoever was watching her, and that was too much work. No, she'd have to call the spaceships to her, keep her saviours carefully hidden away from Torchwood eyes, make sure her departure was kept secret until she was long gone. Maybe go to Barcelona. She'd never been there.

When she took the equipment, none of those idiots asked her why she needed those particular components. Orders from above, they thought. Rose knows what she's doing.

"More than they could ever know," she murmured quietly, smiling a little at their ignorance.

She chuckled absently to herself as she plugged a wire in its receptacle. She did know. Too much, perhaps. Sometimes she hated the Doctor for showing her what life could be.

Something beeped obnoxiously and she jumped before she realised it was just her phone. Her dimensionally transcendent phone. Not that that mattered now, of course.

But perhaps, if she was very, _very _lucky...

She winced as the sound came again, scraping against her eardrums. She pressed the button that answered the call (and stopped the rather irritating noise) and held the mobile to her ear.

"Hello?"

"We've got a spaceship," came Mickey's voice.

She nodded slowly, realised he couldn't see her nodding, and spoke again. "Really? You think you're going to keep me from this absolutely _exhilarating _paperwork with a mere alien spaceship? Please." Her voice dripped with as much sarcasm as she could muster, which was quite a lot, actually. The lie about the paperwork rolled off her tongue with no problems at all and she grinned to herself in triumph.

"Yeah, I know, bit below you," said Mickey in a similar vein. "But I thought I'd ask if your majesty would deign to—"

"I'm coming, I'm coming," interrupted Rose as she suddenly tired of the game, getting up and pressing the "End" button with a little more force than was strictly necessary. She sighed at her half-finished hyperspacial signalling device before shoving it in a drawer. She straightened up and pressed a few buttons on her keyboard until a programme appeared, tracing Mickey's biosignature, then pressed another button to download it to her mobile and practically ran out of the building. Spaceships she liked. They had interesting things in them. Helpful things. Things which could possibly get her off this planet more quickly than any distress signal could. They also had aliens, which, although a great deal of the ones she had encountered in this world were either slimy, ugly, or both, had their good points as well.

She might as well not have bothered downloading the bio-tracer at all, she realised; she could remember where the thing had said Mickey was located— perfectly.

She dodged a particularly imposing and odorous individual when he wouldn't move out of the way and sent a glare at his oblivious back. Couldn't he _tell _that she was someone more important than he was? Couldn't he see her obvious superiority?

She made some sort of derisive noise in the back of her throat and carried on walking.

Something niggled at the back of her mind, telling her that something was Very Impressively Not Right.

She ignored it.

A few minutes later she didn't even need to use her oddly strengthened memory to locate Mickey and the spaceship; she could see the plume of smoke winding its way up between the buildings. She quickened her pace, shoving her way past several people who weren't going quickly enough for her, and half-ran the rest of the way to the crash site.

She grimaced when she saw the ship. The niggling part of her calculated the chances of there being anyone left alive inside it; the rest was quietly mourning the fact that it was almost completely destroyed and therefore probably couldn't help her.

She shook herself and stepped forwards, ignoring Mickey's greeting. She ran her fingertips over the twisted hulk, trying to find a door mechanism that hadn't been fried.

"Heat shield must have failed," she murmured as she felt the still-warm metal, hunting along the half-melted expanse. After a time she both heard and felt a click and a panel of metal sank into the ship before it laboriously screeched open a few inches.

An alien flopped out of the crack and she instinctively jumped back, grimacing slightly at the state of the creature. She'd never seen it before, but she had seen a myriad of other creatures in the state it was in and that was all she really had to know.

Its skin— or carapace, or shell, or whatever it was— was blackened and torn, with rusty brown liquid oozing out from the myriad rends. One eye was fused shut, another was burnt out, and the other two glittered dully at Rose. It might have been somewhat humanoid at some point in time, but it was so tattered from the crash that it was difficult to tell now.

It gurgled something in a language Rose didn't know, but she assumed the basic definition probably ran somewhere along the lines of, "Help me". That's what they generally said. Either that or some sort of threat. Really, they were getting depressingly predictable.

She pulled out her gun and shot the alien right in the middle of what she assumed was its head. When it flopped in a satisfactorily dead manner to the ground, she considered her hunch confirmed.

"What the hell did you do that for?" demanded Mickey, bringing attention to himself for... Actually, she realised, he'd been trying to talk to her before. She thought that she might have been rude in some way, but why should she behave otherwise? It wasn't as if he was her superior...

"It was almost dead anyway," she pointed out, quite logically she thought. "I just saved it from a lot of pain."

"Rose, you _murdered _it! Did you even know what it was?"

"No, but... You saw it," she snapped back. "It was... it was... It was euthanasia. I... I saved it from..." She paused. "You're staring at me," she noted, a little worried at that.

"It could have had some alien regenerative powers or something, it might have survived if you'd left it alone. Didn't you think of that?" he demanded harshly. She flinched a bit. He was too close to her, she needed to get away... but... oh, Zarquon, he was right.

She bit her lip. What was going on? Her dream that morning and the one before it, her reaction to completely harmless people... Thinking Mickey wasn't important, shooting that creature...

"I didn't think about that," she admitted, not quite repentant enough to remove the belligerent tone from her voice.

Mickey gave her an odd look. "You all right, Rose?"

"Fine," she lied. "Just... fine. Just a bit tired is all." She scratched the side of her nose a bit. "Think I'm gonna go home."

He frowned in confusion. "...," he managed to say, but she she quickly interrupted him.

"Whatever it is, it's not going to blow up unless you do something stupid," she called over her shoulder as she walked away.

She sensed that he was going to speak and sped up, feet pounding on the ground more and more quickly until she was running like her life was in danger. She just had to run, run and hide.

She finally stopped, leaning against the inside of the door to her room, panting more than a little. She closed her eyes, forced herself to calm down, just a little bit, and think.

This wasn't her. She hadn't noticed she was changing, but shooting an innocent alien? She wouldn't have dreamt of it just a few days before. Mickey was right, her mum was right, she wasn't Rose any more.

Maybe that was good.

"No," she growled, turning so her forehead rested against the coolness of the door. Not-Rose wasn't good. Not-Rose was _not _good, damn it. Something was happening to her.

It couldn't be mind control. She knew mind control, had been through too much of it not to know the signs. It wasn't possession; she knew she was completely in control of her own body and had been for some time. No, this had to be coming from inside her.

She sighed. Maybe she'd just been overworking herself a little. She should try to sleep.

Maybe it'd sort itself out after that.

-BAD WOLF-

_She whirred forwards, the numbers scrolling across her vision. He was close, the man with the two hearts, her enemy. And then there was... huh. She could have sworn he was dead._

_No matter. He couldn't hurt her, and he wasn't her target. Her fellows had concocted too many plans which did not involve finding and exterminating him first, and that was why they'd lost so many times._

_They'd given her the honour. The new member of their superiority, a creature who had once been one of the impure. She wasn't worthy, yet they wanted her to do it, to kill the man who had brought them all such pain._

_She turned the corner and there he was. He wasn't even trying to run, he was just standing there. Was that defeat she read in his eyes? But the adrenaline... It didn't make sense._

_No matter._

_She raised her gun._

_"Rose," was all he said, in a voice which would have broken her heart if it had not been locked away._

_"Doctor," she acknowledged._

_"You can't do this. Remember who you are."_

_"I am this," she said. "I am a Dalek."_

_"No." He shook his head. "You might have changed a bit, but Rose is still in there, somewhere."_

_"She is this. I am this." Her shell shuddered as she started to panic. "I will exterminate you."_

_He blinked at her. "Go on, then."_

_She paused, confused at his sudden suicidal tendencies, but didn't hesitate for more than a moment._

_She shot._

_There was a scream—_

Rose jerked awake, falling off of the bed and hitting the ground with a cry. She lay panting there for a while before she curled into herself, trembling.

What was happening to her?

-BAD WOLF-

You should be ashamed of yourselves. Really. You, you followers of the Great and Wonderful Doctor Who, are letting yourselves be out-reviewed by _manga fans?? _Geez...

No offence to them, of course, but for Rassilon's sake, guys. My first outing into that fandom got nine reviews in one night and I haven't even properly absorbed the characters yet!

And once again, I'm going to try to poke you into going over to the lovely Seacarda Fox Shadow's page. POKE!! (She's working on a Doctor Who story as well as the Doctor Who/Inuyasha collaborative... thing... If that helps. And, of course, she's my sister.)

Hugs to all!


	3. Chapter 3

Off we go again on our lovely... little... thingie...

**Disclaimer: **I own a rapidly growing collection of chibis... And no, it's not because I forgot to put chibi!TARDIS!Rose and chibi!alt!Doctor in separate boxes. What makes you say that? But anyway, that's it. Heck, the proper chibis all belong to Savannah, I just get the chibis of characters I make up. Or fandoms I like, but she doesn't know about. Or something? I dunno. You think I know chibi-owning hierarchy?

SIAPNIAN: I have had five or six cups of tea today. -giggles- Ooh, this is gonna be fun...

Correction: I re-counted. I had seven. But that was a while ago, so you should be safe for the last two-thirds of the thingie.

**WARNING: **Unbetad, as I'm suffering from severe review withdrawal and I'm too impatient to wait for Kate to get back with me.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose pushed the latest dream aside, in the deepest and darkest corner of her mind. She knew what was happening now— it would take Mickey to _not _know what was going on with her...

He's not _that _much of an idiot, half of herself informed her.

He is inferior, said the other half.

Rose growled and pressed the palm of her hand against her temple. This was getting really, really irritating. She felt schizophrenic, but worse; the two halves of her were in a constant war with each other and she wished that one of them would give up. She didn't much care at this point; the constant feuding was giving her a headache.

Anyway.

It would take a complete idiot not to realise what was going on with her; she was mutating, and she even had a pretty good idea of what she was becoming. But somehow what she was becoming didn't seem to matter any more. She didn't much care now; she just wanted the process over and done with, and the sooner the better.

She had a nagging suspicion she knew which side of her was winning. She had another nagging suspicion that the knowledge should disturb her deeply, but it didn't.

It'd sort itself out eventually.

"Miss Tyler?"

Rose spun around at the sound of her name.

"What is it?"

"The, uh, the creature from yesterday's crash site," said the human. He couldn't have been more than twenty and as Rose hadn't seen him before, she figured that either he was new or she just couldn't keep track of everyone. Judging by his nervousness, she suspected the former.

"It survived?" asked Rose, a little surprised.

"No, it's a different one. It was a two-passenger ship. Anyway, it's not saying anything and we thought that..."

Part of her rebelled. Why did she have to face that thing, anyway? Couldn't someone else do it?

The other part of her rebelled at the rebellion. It was her job, after all, said that part of her.

She shook herself. "Yeah, sure," she said, forcibly silencing herself. "Fine. Gimme a minute, yeah?"

"Miss Tyler—"

"Just a second," she called back as she ran. Everything, she sensed, was falling simultaneously together and apart and she needed to get the one thing that would ensure her survival.

She pulled the desk drawer open, put a few random papers off to the side, and smiled softly as she felt her fingers close around the object she'd been working on so carefully. The amplification wasn't quite as good as she'd hoped it would be, but no matter; she would just have to be content to wait until something came within a few light-years. It wasn't the Galaxy-wide cry for help she'd been hoping for, but it was something.

She chewed on her lip. She'd have to hide it very carefully indeed if she didn't want to get caught; just sticking it in her pocket wouldn't do. She'd have to be a little more elaborate.

Rose only hesitated for a second before she reached for an object she'd hoped she'd never have to use. She glanced around quickly to confirm that no-one else was in the room, hiked up one pant leg, bit her lip and pressed the cold blade against the flesh of her calf.

She failed to keep a slight whimper from escaping her lips as she flicked a switch in the handle and the thermoblade began to live up to its name, cauterising the wound even as it scorched the flesh away in a clean slice.

She grit her teeth and angled the blade down and in, forcing herself not to cry out at the agony. It was necessary, it was necessary, it was necessary, but oh, Zarquon, it _hurt._

She pulled the knife out, unable to take the pain for any longer. The pocket of skin was large enough now, anyway.

Rose pushed the circuit that was the remote transmitter into the pouch she had made. The object felt distinctly odd, nestled in her calf, but she could handle it. She rifled through her drawers until she found the partially functional dermal regenerator they'd finally figured out how to replicate (with her help, of course), then pressed it against the wound.

Her skin tingled, then knit itself back together. The damage underneath couldn't be helped, but it looked like nothing more than a bruise, so it wasn't really necessary to worry about that.

She forced herself not to limp as she walked back to where the newbie was still waiting for her.

"Right," she said. "Where is it?"

-BAD WOLF-

The door closed with a click and the alien glanced up.

It was the same species as the creature Rose had shot, a sort of cockroachy thing. There was a thick black shell on its back, but the dark-brown, leathery body was distinctly humanoid. The head was distorted and deformed to accommodate the myriad black eyes. It was far from unscathed, but the damage appeared to be superficial. It sat neatly in one of two chairs in the smallish room; Rose didn't sit in the other.

"Hello," said Rose.

"I remember you. You killed my father," said the creature instead of returning the greeting. Rose thought the voice might be female, but wasn't quite sure through all the clicks in the background.

"Look, ahm, what's your name?"

The creature made a noise involving seventeen clicks, a crunch and an odd buzzing sound.

"Right," she said uncertainly. "I'll just call you Becky, then. Anyway, Becky, your father would have died anyway."

"He would have got better."

Rose raised an eyebrow. "In forty-seven years, maybe."

"Six months," snapped the creature.

Rose couldn't quite think of a retort to that.

"And I've heard of you," continued Becky. "The great Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth. I've heard, we all have where I come from. You saved the lives of a ship of our scouts."

Rose thought back. She recalled a small group of dragonfly-like creatures a few months back and assumed that those were the things Becky was talking about now.

"But you..." Becky looked scathingly at her, little black eyes sweeping up and down. "You are nothing like that merciful, thoughtful woman they spoke of." The eyes went back up to look dead into Rose's.

"Who are you?" the alien asked. "What have you done to her?"

Rose felt an unexpected anger rising in her chest. "I am her."

Becky shook her head. "Dekklakkrsch do not lie. Something has happened to you since our species last met."

Rose grabbed what she assumed was a wrist, eyes blazing as her fingers dug into the leathery skin. Becky's eyes glinted with pain and just the slightest hint of fear and that, she thought, was good.

"Tell anyone," she growled, "and I'll kill you too."

Becky scoffed. "You won't get out of here without being caught."

"Then I'll kill my captors." Rose's eyes, almost crystalline in her rage, left no room for argument. Her free hand moved to Becky's throat.

"I'd like to see you try," hissed the alien. Irritatingly enough, Rose's attempts to strangle her didn't seem to be working much, if at all. Damn aliens and their stupid biology.

She tensed a little, inhaling, before she suddenly emitted a grating screech that tore through Rose's mind as effectively a morning-star to the brain. She pulled her hands away from Becky to cover her ears with her hands, but the noise savagely continued.

Hissing in pain, stumbling backwards, her back collided with a one of the walls and she collapsed, sliding down its flat surface. She lashed out with one leg, but missed Becky and hit nothing but air.

The door crashed open and the noise finally ceased. Rose got up, a little wobbly now.

Becky appeared to be almost irritatingly calm. "I assume you saw what happened?" she inquired. Rose's eyes spun around to see the guards who had opened the door and stopped the alien's screaming.

One of them nodded solemnly and went over to Rose, who was still trying to use the wall for support and failing miserably.

"Rose Tyler," said the man who was closer than the others, taking one of her forearms and extracting it from behind her back, "I am relieving you of duty on the grounds of—"

"What?" she interrupted. She'd probably done something wrong by Torchwood standards. What was it? What was going on now? Zarquon, she couldn't _think _with the painful echoes of that bloody attack still throbbing deep inside her tattered brain.

The words finally sank in to the functional part of her mind and she lashed out, trying to escape. The guard closest to her had both her wrists now, but she managed to kick him fiercely and his hold loosened enough for her to tear away from his grip. She made for the door, instinctively raking her fingernails across the face of the guard directly in her path. Her distinct lack of aim and habit of chewing those particular weapons meant that it was useless, but it surprised the human enough for Rose to shove her out of the way.

She was almost halfway to the door when someone made a grab for her and ended up with her upper arm. She spun around to attack, but the guards closed in all around her.

Something cold and metallic pressed against the side of her neck; there was a sharp pain where the object touched her, and everything went suddenly and forcefully black.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose woke up and didn't like it.

Keeping completely still, her eyes closed, barely even daring to breathe, she tried to ascertain her precise location and condition.

She was on a floor, tiled, from the feel of it against her cheek. She felt sick and dizzy and her leg hurt like hell, but she was otherwise undamaged. There was the unmistakable rumble of air-conditioning coming from somewhere and the faint paint-smell that they had never quite been able to fully remove drifting about in the air.

So she was in Torchwood, somewhere around the basement, and presumably safe.

Basement.

She cracked open her eyes and could see nothing but whiteness— white floor, white walls, white ceiling. The room was small, each wall being perhaps ten feet in length and height, forming a perfect cube. There was one door and one window, both on the same wall— but now that she knew where she was, she understood she'd never be able to break free on her own.

She tensed the muscles in her damaged calf and felt them flex painfully around the little device inserted therein. She hissed at the momentary discomfort, but at least the thing was still there.

Still transmitting the intergalactic equivalent of a mayday. Someone would come soon. She just had to wait.

She pushed herself to her feet, cursing that bloody alien who had provoked her. In hindsight, perhaps she shouldn't have been so obvious in her change; she could easily have blamed it on stress or something. But she'd got angry at Becky's assumption that her mutations were inherently bad, and her judgement had been clouded as easily as any lesser creature. Stuck halfway between Dalek and human, thought Rose mournfully, was not a good place to be. All the hate, none of the rationality.

She wobbled over to the window facing the hallway, willing the room to stop spinning. Her brain felt odd.

There was no-one there. She growled quietly to herself and hit the thick window with the side of her fist, leaning her forehead against the coolness of the scratched acrylic.

This, she thought, was not good. Logic started to take over; no matter how desperate her signal, it didn't go very far. Even if it attracted a spaceship soon, it would probably be one of the scoutships or traders that so regularly irritated her. She would probably be trapped here for some time before someone managed to get her offworld.

She cursed quietly, then swallowed rapidly. Irrational reactions to situations that did not quite go to plan was a human trait and a trait that had got her in the circumstances she was in now. She had to swiftly cut it out before it did any more damage.

"Hello?" she inquired.

No-one answered. She turned around to slide down the wall and sit on the floor, head cradled in her hands.

This, she thought, was bad.

She fell asleep; she'd escape when she woke up, she resolved as her eyes slipped shut.

_Wasting away outside the shell. She had no nourishment, there was nothing; she was starving and she couldn't do anything about it. The only way out was absolutely inconceivable to any Dalek; she would rather die as she was than live tainted..._

-BAD WOLF-

The door slid open and she jerked into awareness.

She gave the Styrofoam plate piled with chips a dubious glance. Where had it come from? What was she supposed to do with it?

How could it help her escape?

She decided it couldn't, and glanced at the door.

Then again, maybe it could.

"How are you feeling?" asked the human in what Rose assumed was meant to be a kindly voice.

"I want out," she replied succinctly.

The human chuckled. "I'm afraid we can't do that until we properly understand what is happening to you and how to stop it."

She cautiously got to her feet, schooling her features into an expression of innocent confusion. "D'you know anything?"

The human shrugged. "Well, we're not sure yet," she said. "Which is why we need a sample of your blood."

"What'll that do?" Rose asked as she carefully edged forwards, millimetre by millimetre.

"Well, we can—"

She pounced, pushing the human aside and darting for the door. Exhibiting surprising strength and reflexes for such a seemingly harmless female, the creature caught Rose's arm as she tried to flee. She turned to try to free herself, but the human gave her arm a vicious twist which sent pain all the way up to her shoulder and threw her off-balance. She let go, leaving Rose to stumble, gasping, against the wall, cradling her arm.

She slipped through the door. It began to close.

"No!" yelped Rose as she tried to get to her feet. She struggled into a position which was approximately vertical and ran for the door.

It closed a split second before she reached it.

Fury flooded her mind, breaking a resistance she hadn't known she had. With a howl of rage she pounded the wall, the door, the window. She felt a vague sting as the skin of her hands split and warm blood began to trickle down her arm, but ignored it. Perhaps if she struck the surface harshly enough, it would break and she would be able to exterminate the female.

There was a vague crunch as one of her metacarpals snapped. Part of the end broke out from under the skin and she screamed in mingled pain and anger as she renewed her efforts to break free.

The door slid open. She turned to face whoever was coming for her now, her fury burning in her eyes, but before she could so much as touch them something cold and sharp pressed against her neck.

There was a hissing noise, a horrible chill in her blood and she fell lifelessly to the floor.

-BAD WOLF-

Aww, poor Rosie.

Meh, whatever. Woo! -wanders off to get some tea-

**SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION:** I've made a music video which (according to a lot of people) is my best so far. It's Tenth Doctor and is to the song "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby". My username on Youtube is BadWolf1121, if anyone's interested, which no-one is.


	4. Chapter 4

And on we go to check up on Dalek!Rose! :D

**Disclaimer: **I taught myself how to play the Doctor Who theme song, the Stargate SG-1 theme song, Be Thou My Vision, and Iron Man by Black Sabbath on my violin, but does that give me any right to Doctor Who? No. Sigh... they just don't appreciate talent, do they?

**WARNING: Un-beta'd. (Would someone please, please, PLEASE tell me if that needs an apostrophe??)**

SIAPNIAN: I will now put this in very simple terms: Three chapters : nine reviews one chapter : three reviews. Three reviews - one eternally faithful reviewer two reviews, so one chapter : two reviews. One chapter : two reviews NOT HAPPY. Comprende? It's my birthday, guys. Come on.

**Apology: **Due to craziness, school, and an unexpected cold exacerbated by allergies, not every undone story will be updated today. I will update everything, it'll just take me a few days. Today I know you'll get this, _Facets,_and a new Chronicle. The Teaspoon people will get a new chapter of a frankly crap story which is not on this site. Hopefully _Second Chance _will be updated today as well, along with the series following _Distraction _and_Experimentation_, but no guarantees as of yet.

_This is part of the Celebratory Update Spam._

-BAD WOLF-

When she awakened again, she was not alone.

Alone in her prison, yes, but there was someone outside, watching her. Just watching. Dark skin, shaved head, the dullness of stupidity in his dark brown eyes. Mickey.

"Let me out now," she growled, pouring all the fury and hatred she possessed into her gaze.

"Rose, babe, you're sick..." he began, voice muffled by the thick layer of acrylic separating them.

"LET ME OUT!!" she shrieked, pounding the window with the side of her hand. Searing agony zigzagged up her arm as the carefully reset bones were jarred and crunched against each other. She felt the scabs split beneath the casts, blood staining the restrictive material.

Mickey turned away. "Time for another one," he shouted to someone that Rose couldn't see.

The door whirred as it opened and a human male Rose did not recognise stepped through, brandishing the tranquilliser.

She lunged at him, but misjudged the distance and crashed to the ground. She let out an involuntary cry of pain as one of the bones the humans had tried to repair slipped, jabbing through her skin again and poking into the material of the bandages.

She whimpered from the floor as she felt the metal on her neck again, sensed the drug flowing through her system anew.

She wanted to die.

-BAD WOLF-

When awareness returned to her, Rose did not open her eyes; did not, in fact, move at all.

Charging madly would do nothing. If she were going to slip out of her prison, she would have to be stealthier than that. Careful, careful. She'd only get one chance at escape.

They left her food on a fairly regular basis. After the first couple of times, she'd given up trying to eat it; it was fairly obvious that such base physical ingestion would not sustain her. She knew what she needed, but they wouldn't listen, wouldn't give it to her. Perhaps the imbeciles thought that if they starved her of the kind of energy she fed upon now, the thing that had taken her over would die, leaving only her in its place.

Her lips twitched. Idiots. Even that tainted version of the Doctor was clueless.

No, she wouldn't go mad again. She'd remain still, sedentary, defeated, decaying, all the fight out of her. Their guard would eventually drop, and then her chance would come.

She just had to be patient.

A rhythmic vibration went up her calf and she didn't move. She almost, almost smiled, but forced herself to stay calm.

Her mayday had been heard, received, and acknowledged, and someone was coming for her— no— an _army._ The coded buzzing coming from the transmitter in her leg proved that. Oh, this was _perfect. _Had she been human enough for it, she might have laughed.

The door whirred open. She quickly dashed any feeling of triumph and stirred, barely, enough to let the human know she was awake and aware. She heard the sound of something being placed on the floor and didn't react apart from the slightest furrowing of her brow. After a slight pause in which neither party moved, the door slid shut and footsteps receded down the corridor, echoing and fading into complete silence.

And still she didn't move.

-BAD WOLF-

It was the third day of this schedule, and she was only half-acting her weakness, but the humans' guards were slipping. She could sense it, the lack of that faint prickle of adrenaline tingling in the air. They had been confused at first, wary at first; even so, they'd decided eventually that it was better than her trying to tear them into very small pieces every time they opened the door, and promptly began to ignore her behaviour— or lack thereof.

It was, of course, then that she got the second message from the chip embedded in her calf.

It was in the dead of night and the only light came from the hall. She could hear the faint scuffling of the Weevil two cells over, the serene humming from the pyromaniacal Venusian monk in the room across from her, and a faint buzz coming from her calf.

She deciphered the message— distorted with something like static— and frowned, momentary irritation flittering across her mind before she squashed it.

They couldn't come— not all of them, anyway. They could get an individual through… through _what? _What could trap an entire fleet?

She pondered on this for several minutes. When the only option she could think of was forced to be discarded as an impossibility, she gave up, curled into herself and kept waiting.

She was good at that.

Fortunately, she was not forced to utilise the full capabilities of this particular aptitude; scarcely thirty seconds after she had received the message, every alarm in the building went off in a nerve-scorching clamour for immediate attention. Understandably startled, she sprang upright, heart racing, and instantly regretted it. Dizziness set in; the world went purple and black and she sank down again, trying to fight the darkness that squeezed the corners of her vision.

She won.

A faint, crazy, hope mixed with fear twisted her lungs. Only a very few things could set off every alarm in the building.

Even fewer could set off every alarm in the building with just a single individual. Only one, in fact.

Perhaps the impossible was not quite so unattainable after all, she thought, and a smile curved her lips.

They'd exterminate her as one of the impure, but at least they'd destroy her captors too. And that, she thought, was worth it all.

-BAD WOLF-

She was wrong.

She had almost dozed off— she was, after all, injured and hadn't had any form of sustenance for who knew how long— when she heard the distinctive war-cry of her saviour. She savoured the single word, relished the sweet music of the final shrieks of the dying, and didn't feel that she shouldn't.

The distinctive fizzling sound of a Dalek ray reverberated very close and the door slid open.

"You are the one who summoned us?" it grated at her.

She nodded an affirmative and remembered that Daleks did not nod. "Yes," she confirmed.

"You will follow," it said.

She stood, baffled at being allowed to live but not protesting yet. "Why?" she inquired of it.

"You will release the others."

She wobbled slightly. "From the Void?" she asked.

"Affirmative."

A vision whipped across her mind— of Daleks flying over every sky in the universe, of everything not inside a shell lying rotting in the suns, floating dead in space, blown to pieces from the Daleks' hate. Far from terrifying her, as they once had, the images were a source of delight. More so now that she could be the one to make it happen.

"You have knowledge of the operation of the rift-scar?" it prodded her.

"Affirmative," she said, and that felt better. More natural.

"Follow." Without another word, it turned and whirred out of the door.

Smiling, she obeyed, following it out into the hall. At regular intervals the creature paused, shot open a door, and exterminated whatever being lay therein. She didn't protest at the apparent waste of time. How could it be a waste? The longer the creatures were left alive, the more chance they had of touching a Dalek, infecting it.

She shivered in fear at the very thought.

The Dalek went on, whirring smoothly up the stairs. She heard gunfire and chuckled lightly at the humans' folly. Persistent, they were. Irritating, they were.

Dangerous, they were.

The Dalek coolly began its extermination.

"Does anyone know how to fight these things?" shouted one human.

"Miss Tyler would," answered another.

_"Exterminate!"_

_Thud._

"She'll be dead," said another human.

_"Exterminate!"_

_Thud._

An order, the voice giving it harsh with fear, rang out through the room and stabbed into her ears. She heard the rapid, harsh sounds of hard soles striking tiled floors in retreat.

_"Exterminate!"_

_Thud._

_Thud._

_Thud._

Silence.

She let out a breath in relief and poked her head above the stairs. Walking over to one of the bodies, she prodded it with her foot. She remembered him; Daniel something, wasn't it? Never liked him.

She liked seeing him like this.

Taking care not to touch the body itself— she did not know whether or not contact in her present state would poison her with renewed humanity, and she was not prepared to take the risk— she took his gun away and gave it a cursory examination.

Primitive, but workable. She kept it and followed the Dalek as it glided easily out of the room.

They met no other creatures in their journey to the rift's exact location, and she found that slightly unnerving. They were probably massing together, hoping to destroy the Dalek with their combined firepower. She did not worry overmuch about the Dalek itself, although there was a chance that their plan would work; she did, however, worry about herself. Pinned outside the shell without so much as a force bubble to protect her, never mind the nearly impregnable shields of her fellows, she was vulnerable to a fate far worse than death.

She held her gun close. It was the only thing that could protect her.

"Stand near me," ordered the Dalek, and if she did not know for a fact that their limited emotions did not include reluctance, she would have thought she detected a hint of unwillingness in its mechanical voice. "You must be protected."

"Thank you," she said, before she had properly thought it out. The creature's eyestalk swung around to look at her, then revolved back to the front again.

She flinched. Perhaps her change was not quite complete.

At least it was closer. At least she was being rational now.

Her hand twinged as she held the gun a little more tightly, but she did not react. Would not react.

Her suspicion turned out to be correct; as soon as they reached the room where the mostly-healed rift still occasionally bled, they were showered with gunfire. The noise was absolutely deafening.

The Dalek stood there in the doorway, unaffected as it gazed dispassionately at its victims for a moment before it began to eliminate them as well. She took the opportunity to utilise the weapon she had scavenged off of David— Dennis— Daniel. Her aim had improved with her metamorphosis, and a surge of maniacal delight flooded her every time one of the humans fell.

She saw Mickey staring directly at her, mouth open in a shout, eyes wide with terror and something like betrayal, and she _loved _it. Now, she thought, let him feel the pain of everything he put her through when she was still fully human, weak and gullible and prone to such base feelings as affection.

She aimed the gun at him, pulled the trigger, and laughed as he crumpled downwards.

The niggling part of her was silent.

Being at the edge of the Dalek's shield, making sure not to touch it— she might still be contaminated; who could tell?— she was not under its full protection. She cried out involuntarily as a fire of pain struck her in her collarbone, halfway between her neck and shoulder. The bullet, half-melted by its sheer velocity when it struck the force field, scorched into her and she bit her tongue hard to keep from further noise.

Rage.

She spun around, fired at the human who had harmed her, and delighted in her scream.

All was silent.

She remained tense for a few moments before she was satisfied that no further humans would come just yet, and then stepped away from the Dalek, to the computers that were hooked up to the rift.

"I don't know if I can completely reopen the scar," she told the creature who had whirred closer to look over her shoulder, "but what I can do should be enough to let several Daleks through. That will widen it, and then the rest can come."

"You are not like other humans," said the creature as she started diligently hacking through the safety protocols.

"I am not human," she snapped, anger flaring inside her at the very thought. "I have changed."

"Into what?"

She hesitated. "I think I am a Dalek, inside."

Her companion's voice became shrill, and it shook as it talked. "You cannot be Dalek!" it shrieked at her.

She flinched at the insult, but carried on working. If she could never be a true Dalek, she resolved, she would at least assist them as much as she could in their crusade.

The computer gave a warning beep before letting her into the rift controls. Her lips twitched in triumph as she pressed the button that would lead the Daleks into the world.

"There," she said. "I've helped you. Doesn't that mean that I—"

"Others have assisted us," interrupted the creature. "It means nothing."

She clenched her hands into fists and forced herself to stay calm. No matter what this one said, she knew that she was a Dalek. She _knew _it. She could not possibly be anything else.

Familiar watery forms began to take shape as the rift glowed white. She swallowed hard against a flush of something like nervousness through her blood; they were her kind. She was one of them. And if they didn't accept her, she didn't deserve to live anyway.

-BAD WOLF-

And there you have it. Like it? Hate it? Want to punch a hole in my stomach and throw me into a tub full of Goa'uld larvae? Welll, I won't know unless you tell me. And even if you have nothing to say, or if you have been left absolutely SPEECHLESS by my brilliance (as if… -self-deprecating chuckle-), just send me a pack of Gibberish. I've been to Gibber. Lovely place. Nice javelins.


	5. Chapter 5

Chibi!Jack (Skellington) is biting my arm. O.o

**Disclaimer: **I own my own dear little chibi!Dalek!Rose. I love her very much. -huggles her- But I don't own much else.

SIAPNIAN: Eleven? What Eleven? -innocent look- I finally figured out why I didn't like the look of the guy who is to be Eleven. My brother managed to completely sum it up: he looks like a version of the Doctor from a cheap WB knockoff. I'm sure he's wonderful, and I'll probably learn to like him as well as I liked any other random Doctor, but he just looks/feels/whatever _wrong. _But fear not; TEN SHALL LIVE FOREVER IN THE WORLD OF FANFIC. WOOTNESS. -waves random banner-

-BAD WOLF-

It was, of course, at this point when the tainted Doctor decided to show up. He always did have fantastic timing, Rose thought sarcastically. She was hoping that she'd have finished her task by the time he showed up because she didn't want to go through the trouble of killing him herself, but ah well. She should have known, really. A tainted mockery he might be, but there was still something of the Doctor in his blood.

He hadn't been expecting her, apparently. Oh, he knew that something had been different about her, that she wasn't the same weak little human who had trailed behind him for too many years, but he'd had no idea why she was changing.

He ran in with his fifteen or so new victims, carrying something that looked like a gun (but that he would probably insist wasn't, or wasn't even a weapon; really, his hypocrisy was ridiculous) that had had a bad run-in with a disco ball and origami paper, all fire and defiance and rage; and then he saw her.

She could have laughed, but that would require emotion.

His grasp on the weapon went slowly, ineffably limp. His facial muscles had deadened into his old customary mask, but his eyes glittered with a maelstrom of dark sensations; her seeming betrayal had finally broken him.

"Rose," he whispered.

The Daleks shifted behind her, waiting. What she did now, she knew, would either gain their grudging half-trust or mark her as something Different, something not Dalek, something to be destroyed.

She took one further moment to wallow in the delight inherent in making the Doctor, any Doctor, suffer before she calmly raised her gun, aimed it carefully at his singular heart, and pulling the trigger in one smooth motion.

As if that singular shot had been a signal, her fellows instantly began firing, gliding easily forwards and exterminating the Doctor's last followers before vanishing behind doors, seeking out whoever else might still be alive and making sure that they would not remain in that unfortunate state. As they went out of the room, more Daleks materlialised behind her and went out in their turn.

Rose had done her work. All there was to do now was wait.

And kill things, she thought with a deep internal smile, gripping her weapon and fairly skipping out of the room.

-BAD WOLF-

It is needless to say that Davros had failed, once again, to be thoroughly killed. Oh, there was less of him, and he was looking even more dilapidated than he was in his last uprising, but there he was. Still breathing, more or less. Tattered heart still palpitating faintly.

He was more machine than man now, not that he had been a man for centuries. The flesh that he had sacrificed to recreate his precious Daleks had been replaced with a tightly-woven wire mesh; torn and scorched organs had been replaced with metal equivalents, wires had been threaded through his veins to continually deliver electricity to power his new body parts (along with the occasional shock to his heart, which kept trying to stop), and the scorched optical device in his forehead had been so damaged that it had to be replaced. But he was still alive, more or less.

He refocussed his eye on the viewscreen before him, a vague sort of humming starting in his tattered throat. As he viewed the world through the eyes of one of his precious creations, a vague half-surprise flitted through his rotted brain; that he hadn't expected.

It was going to be interesting to see how this turned out, he thought, shifting slightly in his seat with what might have been mistaken for a smile. Very interesting indeed.

One half-metal finger pressed against a red button on the arm of his chair. "Bring the human to me," he said, the words barely audible from the rasping growl that permanently laced his voice. The smoke damage from the fire that had nearly killed him had scorched his vocal cords and deadened his lungs; he could barely speak at all now, and definitely not painlessly.

The Dalek didn't say anything, but he knew that his orders would be obeyed. He would show the Doctor for thinking that he was the slave of his own creations, locked in the basement like a common lunatic. His Daleks would not dare to defy him now, not when he was basically one of them, and the Doctor...

He chuckled to himself, pain lancing through his tattered vocal cords. At last he had found the perfect revenge.

The Doctor would mourn the day he'd learned to love his companions.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor, meanwhile, was completely unaware of any of this. It was another day, another alien threat had been beaten, Rose was completely fine, living out her comparatively miniature lifespan with that of his half-clone, safe and happy. He'd given her everything she wanted, really, and still kept her somewhere where anything that could hurt her would be destroyed before it had the chance; after all, he himself was protecting her, in a way. She was safe, she was happy, she was safe... and happy... and that was good, right?

Of course it was.

He stared at the console and fought back the nagging, biting, itching timesense that told him he should never have let her go.

-BAD WOLF-

Quick question. I've a Pushing Daisies/Doctor Who crossover I'm writing that I will upload at some point. Any ideas for a title?

For that matter, can you think of a better title for my Nightmare/Doctor Who crossover than The Nightmare Before Otherstide? I fear that if I keep the working title permanently people will be frightened away by the idea that it does what it says on the tin, which it does not. The plotline has nothing to do with any Gallifreyan equivalent of holidays, but that's the best title I've got...

Sigh.

Ehh, what's next? _The Sea, _isn't it? Oh, wait, no. _Facets. _(Damn.)


	6. Chapter 6

Dum doodle dee dum dum dum.

**Blame: **Brona19. This fic would have happily remained in its stagnation but for his insistence that I update. :)

SIAPNIAN: ...HI!!!

Disclaimer: Negatiiive.

-BAD WOLF-

She was not surprised that Davros wished to see her in person, nor was she nervous about meeting him again. Both surprise and nervousness were human things to feel, and she knew nothing of them. She supposed that she would have felt both of these things if she were still as deeply contaminated as she once was. No more.

A little starburst of pleasure exploded behind her eyelids, and she squished it with a tinge of fear. She had exterminated no one in that moment. There was no need for even satisfaction. She needed to pay closer attention to her reactions, to starve out the bit of human that still lived inside her before it could do her more damage.

"Rose Tyler," rasped a familiar voice from the darkness ahead, and she detected an odd kind of pleasure in his tone.

"Davros," she acknowledged, stopping, keeping a respectful distance from the Creator of the Daleks. _Her_ creator, in a way, although she had started out more tainted than he.

The two Daleks who had escorted her backed away, circling, taking unseen positions at the edges of the poorly-lit room. She supposed that it would be unwise to waste power on lights while imprisoned in the Void, and Daleks could see in the dark anyway— but it was rather inconvenient for _her._

Still, she didn't matter, and she couldn't expect the Daleks to cater to the conveniences of someone who was not one of them— yet. She stood patiently as the chair she could dimly see before her revolved, revealing a Davros even more decayed than she remembered.

"Turn the lights up for Miss Tyler," grated the ancient scientist.

The illumination in the room reluctantly intensified, and she could now make out the details of the cyborg before her. Anger flared up inside her— he was the creator of them all, and yet he was thus dilapidated?

"An unfortunate necessity," he said slowly, and sucked in a languid breath that sounded more like a death rattle than an inhalation. "For all their advancements, Daleks lack the imagination that is needed to perform my duties... and until I can successfully preserve myself within the shell, I must resort to this."

She instinctively flinched. He could see what she was thinking?

"A simple upgrade," he acceded. "I can see everything your mind has ever felt."

She spoke her first words since coming here. "Then you know of what has been happening over the past..." She faltered here. Her sense of time was usually very good, but it was difficult to ascertain how long had passed since being locked in Torchwood's cellar of a prison, where the lights went on and off according to when someone wanted something out of the captives and had no correlation to day or night. Especially when a decent period of that time was spent unconscious for who knew how long. "Several days," she finished lamely, wishing she could be more precise.

"Yes," he confirmed. "And it is truly... fascinating, the way you've changed. You may still look very human, but your mind..."

She straightened up slightly. Could she be a Dalek, after all? Might they...?

"Under... normal circumstances, you would be pulverised and your atoms formed into a true Dalek," Davros went on, "but under the circumstances... I am quite curious as to how you would turn out without assistance."

"But— she is human!" yelped one of the nearby Daleks, incredulous.

"Your ancestors were all once something similar," Davros said dismissively. "And what I am doing is very little different from what your own Emperor did on more than one occasion."

The Dalek was silent, but she could feel its hatred of her still. She flinched.

"Being hated by Daleks is hardly a novelty to you, I think," said Davros with a kind of rasping chuckle.

She assented to that.

"But consider, my children," continued the scientist, "the unique... uses she could have. She has previously split the Void, and could do so again for us, once her knowledge becomes ours. Also, she is perhaps the only Dalekish creature the Doctor would hesitate to kill." He did the rasping laugh again on the last sentence, but she was unaffected by this; she was, however, somewhat stung by the _ish _he had accused her of.

"I have offended you?" he laughed, surprised. "Oh, you'll do very well. Very well indeed."

-BAD WOLF-

_The process was painful— of course it was. Although she was not pulverised— all things considered, she was left surprisingly intact— she still needed to be wired into her shell quite thoroughly, and this act left gaping holes in her flesh stretched over the myriad tubes and neural extenders she needed to survive and commune with her shell. She was constantly fed with a miniature current of temporal radiation, and aided by that she felt even stronger than when she was human; but the pain was still there, and at times it was near unbearable. More than once, she gave into her weakness, switched off her speech systems and cried softly to herself inside her cage; but she quickly overcame such weaknesses and went about her duties._

_And her duties, surprisingly, were many; even after she had uploaded all useful knowledge into the central computers, Davros had assigned her to the taskforce in charge of safely splitting the Void. She and many of her fellows would have happily ignored the safety factor and fractured the Doctor's universe— and all other universes— until everything imploded, and then bang. No more Doctor, no more tainted, no more problem. But Davros had a grudge against the Time Lord; he wanted to see him suffer, to see him die, to hear his final scream. It was perfectly illogical— yes, it was enjoyable seeing one's victims in the unbearable pain before their contamination was removed from the universe forever, but the Doctor was dangerous to them. He should not be allowed to live even one second past when he was found. Shoot on sight._

_But, of course, they dared not think this too loud, and they dared not defy Davros. He was their creator, and they must obey him._

_She was not sure how long they remained in the Void, painstakingly working the larger cracks open wide enough to come through in force. Occasionally they would send one or two Daleks to the other side as scouts, but only a very few returned. They could only assume that the rest had been discovered by their enemy and destroyed; they could not know for sure until the gaps were wide enough for the whole army to go through, and they could not do that until the Void was properly cracked._

_And then, one day, perhaps six standard Earth months after her entrance into the shell, the Void gave up. Without ceremony, without fanfare or even the slightest explosion, it gave way, cracked fully, and vomited the Dalek ships back into their home universe before busily attempting to repair itself._

That had been months ago. She and all her fellows had been searching for the Doctor, individually or in pairs and groups, but for all their advancements they did not know the Time Lord as she did.

And that was why, when her superior finally acceded to her plan, she was completely unsurprised to see the familiar shape of the TARDIS heave itself into view one wet day in Cardiff while she watched not twenty feet away.

Her shell hummed lightly with anticipation as the door cracked open.

-BAD WOLF-

There. You happy now?

Sorry this was so short. I feared what might happen if I delayed another day. :P If there's anything wrong with this— plot holes, canonical issues (hah! As if there's anything even vaguely like a canon breach in Doctor Who; the whole frakking _thing _is a canon breach), general suckiness, tell me and I'll try to fix it. Unless I can't. Then it stays the way it is, and you can call it AU. :)

Review, please, my lovelies, if you have any affection for me at all.


	7. Chapter 7

And here I am once again. Hi!

**Disclaimer:** If I did… greh, the list of changes would be too long to put here. So there.

SIAPNIAN: This would be my birthday present to the wonderful and talented Brona19. GO GIVE HIM A HUG.

-BAD WOLF-

She wasn't smug. There was no possible way she _could _be smug, after all. There was a faint glow somewhere in the back of her cranium, but even Daleks could feel triumph at the capture of prey.

She switched off her cloaking device and whirred towards the timeship. Her compatriots were off searching elsewhere; she was the only one who had thought to patrol the Rift. …Of course, this was partially because she hadn't actually told her superiors about this idea; rather, in every free moment (which was a lot of the time-- her brethren preferred to leave most of the more important search attempts to those who were naturally Dalek), she slipped over to bask in the radiation and wait for him.

Her reasons for wanting to catch him on her own were perfectly clear and logical. Her fellow Daleks didn't trust her-- and, although that unmistakably nagged at her, she understood. Her background was far from pure; the only biological mutations she had undergone were so superficial as to be ignored, and she had never had the chance to prove that the psychological alterations ran deeper than the surface level. This was her chance, therefore. Catch the Doctor, betray the creature her impure self had loved more than most people could possibly imagine, and they would finally know she was just like them.

She shivered in anticipation as she approached the TARDIS, her machinery shifting as she brushed the circuits with a thought; she wanted to capture him on her own, but she should at least inform her superiors she'd found him. As soon as the signal was echoing across the universe, she spoke.

"Doctor…" she called, just as soon as she was in earshot. Her voice annoyed her; despite the fact that it was twisted and distorted from the speech system, it still came from her vocal cords and it still sounded female.

Oh well. Perhaps the novelty of it would bring him out more quickly.

She let her built-in chronometer click the seconds impassively away, trying not to count them, trying not to let herself grow impatient. She wasn't human anymore; there was no use for such an emotion. The Doctor would come out when he was-- ah, there he was. Stepping calmly outside the TARDIS, coat swishing around his ankles, a vague disinterestedness carefully constructed about the way he carried himself. She saw through it.

"The Daleks aren't coming," he told her, matter-of-factly.

She paused. She hadn't been expecting that.

"You think an entire fleet of Daleks can come swooping in out of the Void looking for me and committing random acts of destruction and I won't notice?" His eyebrows were raised in a superior kind of incredulity. "I may not be the most observant person to travel the Universe, but _really._" He sniffed. "Soon as I saw you'd started it, I blocked the signal. You're the only one here."

Daleks did not seethe.

"You lie," she informed him, but she heard the faint uncertainty in her own voice. If she had miscalculated, this could be devastating.

"Nope, I really don't," he said, twisting his lips upwards in what was probably meant to be a grin. So he _was _afraid of her. Good.

When the movement came, it was too quick for thought; she saw him tense, and a scant half-second later there was a quick ripping sound and she felt a good deal less mobile than usual.

She backed away as soon as her head cleared; the Doctor so rarely demonstrated his own spatiotemporal powers, she had forgotten he could move that quickly. She needed to be more careful-- but what had he done? She couldn't see; she tried to move her gun arm, then her manipulator, but they shifted just barely and then froze, stuck. Instinctively, she heated the lens on her eyestalk, trying to scorch away whatever was covering it, but it resisted. What _was _this?

"What have you done to me?" she demanded of him, shaking her eyestalk furiously up and down to try to clear the obstruction, but it remained firm.

"Well," the Time Lord said from somewhere behind her, "it _used _to be duct tape. I might have played with it a bit."

No. Dark hatred swelled in her chest, her shell vibrating slightly from the conflicting thought patterns stabbing through her. This… He was _toying _with her. Orders be damned-- as soon as she could see him, get a clear shot, he was dead. Davros was a fool if he thought to keep alive a creature that treated them with such disdain--

Her shell moved forward without her command. Disoriented, she lurched, trying to resist, but a momentary diagnostic identified it as some kind of miniature gravity field. Well, she thought bitterly, at least he wasn't trying to push her anywhere with his foot. Furiously, she wiggled her gun arm. It was uniquely humiliating, being thus restrained by _duct tape _of all things; but although it might have been ridiculous, it was also effective.

Damn him.

"Now," he said, voice slipping into a tone of disturbing levity, "let's see why you sound like a girl, shall we?"

-BAD WOLF-

Prying open its-- _her_-- shell was much harder than it looked, to the Doctor's displeasure. His mind buzzed with a thousand questions--what was Davros up to? Whether Daleks still had genders wasn't something he cared to know, but why did this one suddenly sound different? What was going on?--, and the longer the Dalekanium remained firm the longer he had to suffer with them unanswered. The easiest way would be to get the creature to open it up herself, but somehow he doubted that was particularly likely. She sat, and she shook; every now and then, she tried to burn or wriggle or tear his enhanced duct tape, but past that she wasn't doing much. She hadn't even tried to shoot anything, despite the fact that her gun arm couldn't move. He'd stepped in its way more than once, and she hadn't even tried to fire. What was wrong with her? Why wasn't she trying to kill him?

Why was she a _she?_

He glared at her, and she sat there impassively and stared at the tape obstructing her vision. Clearly, nothing of what he was doing was going to work, and she wasn't about to just open up and let him have a look at her; but there had to be something…

His eyes lit unexpectedly on her gun, taped pointing harmlessly downwards, and a faint glow of an idea started up in his chest.

Not much could cut through Dalek armour.

Not much could stop a Dalek ray.

Oh, she was so not going to like this, he thought, grinning, and ran to find something to reflect the blast.

-BAD WOLF-

The device was ready, the calculations complete, and he'd managed to extract a promise from an oddly-reluctant TARDIS that she'd nudge the ray if the Dalek didn't quite shoot straight. Normally, he would have questioned the timeship on her recalcitrance-- it made no sense; normally she'd be annoyed that he was trying to keep the thing alive, not his methods of getting the casing open. He supposed it might be part of her ever-present disinclination to manipulate spacetime for any reason other than carting him through it, but… still, it didn't quite make sense.

Oh well. He'd be able to ask the old girl what was wrong after he got the casing open, he supposed. He was fairly bouncing with excitement; very, very soon, if all went well-- and of course it would-- he would finally be able to answer all the questions that had been bugging him since this little Dalek had shown up on the Rift, waiting for him.

"Hello," he told her cheerfully. Her eyestalk swiveled instinctively, blindly following his voice.

"Doctor," she growled.

"Oh, don't worry, you'll get the chance to kill me soon enough." He had to keep talking, had to keep her tracking his movements. It was okay if she missed him a little bit, but anything else would be useless.

Her eyestalk instinctively followed him in a jerking pattern, blindly marking his position. Good. He readied the sheet of phlebotinum he'd managed to scavenge, held his breath-- and ripped the modified duct tape off of the creature's gun.

It went even better than he had dared to hope. The TARDIS didn't even need to interfere; as soon as the weapon was freed, its owner instinctively whipped it up and fired between the Doctor's hearts. In a microsecond he calculated the precise angle of the shot, and with blurring speed held up the phlebotinum accordingly; the deadly ray struck the Dalek's side, and a good bit of the shell there was obliterated in the blast.

Unsurprisingly, things didn't continue to go that well for very long.

An anguished, semi-mechanical shriek rent the air, and the Doctor's blood froze in his veins. What he'd just done couldn't have been pleasant, he knew-- he'd been expecting a scream, but…

Tattered memories flitted across his brain, trying to tell him why the noise had so affected him, but the smoke was starting to clear and he pushed them away. It was no use chasing after ghosts, when--

--wait--

What was that? That wasn't Dalek skin--

Shaking for reasons he didn't even want to think about, the Time Lord stepped round for a better look. The blast was well-aimed; it had shorn off a huge chunk of the armour that sheathed the creature, leaving it-- her-- fully exposed.

He knelt beside the cage, breath ceasing. A human woman, naked save for the wires that connected her to her shell, was cradled inside the metal. He couldn't see her face-- curled in a foetal position, her forearms and knees obstructed his view-- but he knew. He knew every curve in her body, the delicate shape of her, every bone in her skeleton and every hollow where they met. Even grey from darkness and sickness, painfully thin from malnourishment, scorched from the reflected ray, skin full of jagged rips from the wires stabbing into her flesh, he knew her.

_"Rose,"_ he whispered, voice choked. She flinched at the sound of her name, trying to get as far away from him as her shell would allow. She raised her head and glared at him, pupils so massive from the dark of her cage that her irises were hardly visible.

"Release me," she snapped. Her lips moved, her voice hissed along the air-- barely audible above the rasping croak that emanated from the machine. "Doctor. You will _release me!_"

The Doctor had never been sorrier to have a question answered.

-BAD WOLF-

Gotta love Doctor!torture, really. Poor thing. -gives him a hug-

Remember, I'm in the Support Stacie April Author Auction. Along with a lot of people who are much better than me. You know you want toooooooo… :)

And, again-- HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRONA19. You are wonderful.


	8. Chapter 8

Look, xLaramiex! MORE updates!! LIKE OMG. And stuff.

**Disclaimer: **I hate that word. .

SIAPNIAN: WHO noticed the TV Tropes reference in the last chapter? Eh? Eh? :D

**WARNING: **Betaed by Aelita Madeline, who is lovely and talented and also seems to be of the opinion that nothing needed to be changed in this chapter. Being the one who _wrote _it, I am slightly sceptical of this, but...

-BAD WOLF-

The pain was incredible.

She had been expecting that-- the Doctor had been putting her through quite a lot of that in the past half-hour or so, and she had been expecting days more as he tried to pry her shell open--, but she hadn't been expecting it _then_, and she hadn't been expecting the sheer power of it.

It was agonising.

In retrospect, just up and firing at him probably hadn't been a good idea; what, had she thought he would just _slip _and free her gun arm? That the tape, after all her attempts to rip it off, would simply fall away? That the Time Lord had decided to free her _without _some kind of deception?

She supposed she could blame it on instinct, but the sheer stupidity of the action burned at her. Her superiors would be ashamed. Would be, if they could hear her screaming… if the Doctor hadn't…

Something very like fear stirred in her shell-- well, the part that hadn't been blasted off with all the subtlety of a rhinoceros attack. She'd seen the Time Lord like this before, knew that when it came to the Daleks he would not stop, and even his thin façade of pacifism dropped. But… even knowing how he could get, it was somehow different from the other side.

The ragged edges of her shell sang with agony, sparking ineffectually; she hissed, tears springing to her physical eyes as she assessed the damage. Her precious armour was clearly torn apart beyond repair; if she made it back to her kind, if they didn't exterminate her for her failure, she would have to be transplanted. As to the injury to her body… well… she'd live, but she felt the vicious burn-marks all along her side.

This was ridiculous. She was a Dalek, she would survive. Even with her shell ripped apart and blood leaking haphazardly from her scorched skin, she would kill him _slowly_, a thousand times over, for what he did to her, what he did to all her fellows. For a moment, she felt she almost understood Davros's logic in keeping the old Time Lord alive; death was far too kind a fate.

Footsteps, so soft as to be barely detectable, circled her to come to a stop at her side. She heard him kneel, heard his breath cease, knew he recognised her.

_"Rose,"_ he whispered, and his voice held a galaxy of pain. She flinched away from him, hating him, fearing his touch. The terror for her life she had briefly experienced as he shot her armour from her body evaporated; she remembered who she had been Before, remembered what she had been to him. He wouldn't dare hurt her now he knew her identity. She was in too much pain herself to feel pleasure at his; but her logical self, her Dalek self understood the weapon she now held.

Death was too good for him. This was better, and she filed the knowledge away for future reference. Shaking with rage, she raised her head-- her muscles protesting as they slowly remembered their function-- and fixed him with a glare that froze him to the spot.

"Release me," she hissed, furious. "Doctor." He flinched at the sound of his name; she'd have to remember that for when she wasn't in hideous agony. "You will _release me!_"

Infinitely slowly, he swallowed, his dark eyes never leaving hers. Even the faint light outside her shell blinded her, and she retreated further into it, blinking. When he finally opened his mouth to answer, his voice was tight, broken.

"Oh, Rose," he murmured. "I don't think so."

Another flash of anger shot through her being. He was using her name on _purpose, knowing _it was a fragment of her life Before. Even emotionally compromised from the revelation of what had become of her, he was _still _manipulating her, _still _trying to twist her around into doing his will. She opened her mouth, preparing a tirade, but just before the first words left her lips she was interrupted.

The TARDIS door slammed open. "Doctor!" shouted a ragged voice-- _Jack?_ He was alive? …well, that was unexpected. "Get out of the way!" There was a hum-- some kind of weapon, although with her vision impaired she couldn't identify it beyond that. Instinctively, she tried to swivel her torso section and shoot the man, but found that she was immobilised; she attempted a diagnostic, and then remembered that she was about to die anyway so it didn't matter.

The Doctor stood, disturbingly quick, and shouted at his old companion. "Jack, _don't!_"

As irrational as the command was, the Captain obeyed; she heard the dangerous whirring slow, then cease altogether as the weapon stopped charging. Perhaps Davros would let her keep her Dalek status after all; she could prove useful, if the Doctor was this loath to allow her destruction. She'd have to think about that.

The Time Lord huffed an exhalation, trying to pull himself together. "Thanks," he murmured.

"Um, Doctor?" the other man said, hesitantly.

"I know," he snapped. "I know, and I'm trying _very _hard to find out why, so could you please come over here and help me get her out?"

There was a clatter as something was set on the floor, a creak as the doors closed. Jack's footsteps rattled the grating as he jogged up to the Time Lord. "What do you mean, 'her'?" he inquired, confused.

She shrank further into the remains of her shell. She didn't want to be seen, didn't want to be stared at and poked and prodded to see what was "wrong" with her.

The Doctor hesitated, swallowed, and took a step back. "Take a look," he said.

Jack moved, knelt by the gap in her armour. She curled into herself, hiding, retreating from the light.

"She's _human?_" the Captain demanded. She shifted so she could see out the crack behind where her elbows rested on her knees; he was looking up at the Doctor, incredulous.

"Worse than that," he replied grimly. "Look at her face."

She had no intention of letting him do that, and buried her head in her knees. "Release me," she croaked, more out of habit than any belief that they'd actually obey.

They didn't just disobey; Jack actually reached out and _touched _her, prying her arm away from her face as gently as he could. She growled in frustration and tried to tear herself away, but jagged pain lanced from her burns and her withered strength was no match for him. Instead, she relaxed, and waited for him to let go.

She didn't have to wait long. With a choked cry that was anything but articulate, the man dropped her limb as if it scorched him and hastily retreated.

"I don't know what's happened," the Doctor explained miserably, words slipping out of his mouth almost too quickly to be heard. "I didn't try to bring her back after she was trapped in Pete's World, I thought she would be safe there and it was impossible to break through anyway, so why bother trying? I mean, even if I found a way through and she kept travelling with me she would have died before too long, she'd cheated death too many times and I _knew _she was supposed to leave me one way or the other, so I figured living in an alternate reality would be better than her dying outright and I just _left _it. She was safe when I last saw her, Jack, I _swear_ to you, I don't know…" His voice broke and he sucked in a breath. "And I knew the Daleks had come back-- well, I was expecting that, they always do, but I didn't think… She showed up outside the TARDIS and I didn't know who she was, I just knew that she sounded like a _she _and that wasn't normal, so I got her to try and shoot me so I could reflect the ray back on her and get her cage open, and she screamed…" Another ragged inhalation. "And I--"

Much to her irritation-- the more the Doctor spoke, the more distraught he became, and that was a _good _thing. Stupid humans--, Jack halted the tirade.

"Alright," he said. "I believe you."

There was silence for a moment. She wondered half-heartedly what was going on outside her shell, and then remembered that if they had their way she was going to find out pretty soon.

Jack spoke again. "Let's get her out of there."

Bastards, she thought fiercely, surprising herself. Profanity wasn't a Dalek thing, and she needed to hold on to what Davros was kind enough to give her. If they were going to break her, going to try and make her human again, she needed to resist. And she couldn't say she was anything but impure if she was immaturely, _humanly,_ cursing the creatures out. Even if it was only in her head.

As soon as she finished thinking that, however, the only thoughts that remained _in _her head were of the kind that was blisteringly obscene enough to make Jack uncomfortable; for the two creatures outside had knelt and were now attempting to detach her from her shell. The sound of the sonic screwdriver assaulted her ears in a most vicious manner, and one by one she felt the connections to her home drop out of her skin; the cradle of machinery holding her in place loosened, and she began slipping perilously close to the gap in her armour. Stubbornly, she curled up as far from the Doctor and Jack as possible; but as soon as the last wire slid out of her body, one of them-- she thought it was Jack-- reached in to start pulling her away. Feebly, she grasped at the cords that had heretofore been keeping her alive, tried to scrabble for any kind of purchase on the machine that was her home, but she failed. Struggling inasmuch as she could, given her weakened state, she was carefully extracted from the shell and pulled upright. The light was horrible, stabbing her eyeballs and leaving agony in its wake; she shut her eyes tight against it. She thought it dimmed, almost apologetically, but she couldn't be sure.

"There we are, Rose," Jack said, holding her carefully (she would normally have been amused at his strict avoidance of the less decent parts of her anatomy, but considering the situation she didn't think much of it apart from how it would help her escape). "Doctor?"

The Time Lord jerked, evidently returning from whatever melancholy part of his mind he'd been dwelling in. "Right," he said, and approached her. She recognised the ballpoint-like object he drew out of one of his pockets and burst into motion.

Jack stayed very firmly put, only shifting to twist one of her arms around to lie flat against her back; she tried valiantly to pry his fingers from her abdomen, but was too weak from her time in the shell. Mentally cursing vividly enough to cause the TARDIS to flicker in disapproval (so the old timeship was still trying to invade her head, then), she tried to simply drop out of the human's grip.

"Let me _go,_" she growled, when all she managed to do was pull a muscle somewhere in the vicinity of her spine. "Jack, let me _go._ Doctor--"

Something cold and sharp pressed into her throat and hissed. She felt her mind clouding, muscles going dead one by one, and she cried out in rage and powerlessness as the drug took over her system.

"I'm sorry," the Doctor whispered, and the world went black.

-BAD WOLF-

Woo, there's another one, then. ^_^ Why the sudden rush of updates? Dunno. Why the sudden rush of updates to _this story _in particular? One, Brona19's OC is very persuasive. B., all the unfinished stories are starting to intimidate me. 3., the longer and more epic fanfics I've been working on would take longer to kill than the cute little ones like this. And four, I _really _love Dalek!Rose right now.

You're prolly getting REALLY sick of hearing this, but I'm going to tell you again: I, AND A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO ARE BETTER THAN ME, AM IN THE SUPPORT STACIE APRIL AUTHOR AUCTION. Details should be on the top of my profile page. 'Kay?

Love you all! Be well.


	9. Chapter 9

Wow, it's been a while. I'm dreadfully sorry, guys. You have Brona19 to thank for the updates, though, because… well, because A. he gave me EPIC INSPIRATION and B. he sent me a picture of the Eye of Sauron when he learned how I had been neglecting this. …So Yeah.

Disclaimer: -headdeskheaddeskheaddesk-

SIAPNIAN: …Hi! I changed the title. You may have noticed this. Oh, and you'll notice a surfeit of unreferenced pronouns in Rose's bits. This is intentional, I promise. And... if this sounds weird, I'm sorry. I apparently get out of practice if I don't update at least once a week. D:

**Non-Warning: Betaed by Brona19.**

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor attempted to eye the unconscious woman before him with equanimity—a task which ultimately proved to be fruitless. Instead, he opted to _pretend_ that he was eyeing her with equanimity. Lying was much better than actually trying to sift through the tangle of rapidfire emotions patiently trying to hijack his mind.

"Care to tell me why you're locking her in the zero room?" Jack interjected. Jack, right. He was still here, wasn't he?

"Free of external influence," he said. "I'm keeping her from feeding off of the temporal radiation in the rest of the TARDIS."

Jack blinked.

Sensing the man's confusion, the Time Lord continued. "She's not just behaving like a Dalek. She _is _one, in every way that matters. Obviously, I'd need time to figure out exactly how much of her DNA has changed, but…" He trailed off for a moment. "The Daleks would never accept her as more than a… a… a servant unless she really was one of them."

"That doesn't make sense," the walking anomaly beside him objected. "I know Rose. She's about as human as a person can _get_."

"Not anymore." The Doctor inhaled. "Come on. I don't want to be in her way when she finds out what's happened."

-BAD WOLF-

The world swam into existence somewhere in front of her eyelids, and she groaned. She didn't know what kind of concoction the Time Lord had assaulted her with, but the aftereffects were… unpleasant. Liquid fire pooled around her brain, behind her eyes, down her neck, throbbing in rapid waves of pain.

She bit back a whimper and forced herself to focus on the situation at hand. A quick mental inspection proved that she was unharmed; her hands still throbbed slightly, but she blamed her earlier tantrums for that. She was much better now; she would not injure herself again. The Doctor had also provided her with clothes, for which she was grudgingly glad. She felt naked enough just not having her shell to protect her; if he had left her in her previous state of undress…

…if he had left her in her previous state of undress, at least he wouldn't have touched her at all. She forced herself to dwell on that. Knowing the Doctor, he was going to do his best to persuade her out of being a Dalek. Now, more than ever, she had to resist the lingering vestiges of humanity that still clung to her body.

So, she thought. Where had the great Doctor decided to shove her this time?

Finally opening her eyes and pushing herself into a sitting position, she examined her surroundings. The room looked much the same as most others in the ship, the bronze walls with their oddly organic look, light seeming to come from the ship itself rather than any visible outlet. The grating acting as the floor was the same, but the Doctor had seen fit to put a mattress in the corner, and it was that object on which she currently sat. Past that, it was a rather unsurprising bit of TARDIS architecture. Judging by the size and shape of it, though—and, most particularly, the distinct lack of the slightest spatiotemporal ripple—he'd locked her in the Zero Room.

He'd locked her in the _Zero Room_. It wasn't that it was the most effective prison; there were literally thousands of other places in his maze of a ship that would work just as well. Oh, no. It wasn't about keeping her in one place. It was about keeping her isolated. Keeping her away from the radiation that fuelled her.

The Doctor was _starving _her.

Suddenly furious, she hooked her fingers into the grating beyond the edge of the mattress and glared at the door.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose's mood had, evidently, not improved when the Doctor next came to see her. At least she wasn't being violent about it this time, he supposed, although that was probably because she didn't have any kind of weapon this time. She couldn't even physically overpower him when she was at the peak of her health. Emaciated and atrophied as she was—and oh, how painful it had been to see her like that—she didn't stand a chance of even hurting him. Instead of attacking him, then, she just sat there, curled into herself, and stared at him.

"Hello," he said.

"You will kill me," she said conversationally.

"No."

Not the slightest emotion flickered over Rose's face—an impressive change from how she had been earlier. "You removed me from—"

"Not all of it," the Doctor replied softly.

Daleks were clever. Rose was cleverer. She knew what he was implying, and tensed. Her eyes narrowed, hardened, cold, sunken slits. "Any Dalek would rather die than accept a touch from _you._"

"True," he agreed, beginning to pace. "But you aren't really a Dalek, Rose." Purposefully calling her by her name, purposefully trying to remove her from her mutation-induced delusions…

Really, he wasn't even hurting her by the isolation. Dalek bodies, such as they were, were sustained by their shells; while they did have an inherent sensitivity to and minor need for radiation, it primarily was a source of power for their armour and, through that, their physical forms. Rose, still biologically retaining most of her humanity, still needed food to survive. Her shell, while it kept the inevitable starvation away, just wasn't quite compatible.

Thus her current state.

The Doctor consciously turned his thoughts away from that visualisation and instead decided to dwell on others. She couldn't have been terribly important to his arch-nemeses (one of many, he thought grimly), or they would have found a more efficient way to keep her alive. At the very least, they would have told her of her weakness…

No, her state had been a temporary advantage to them. They knew very well that the Time Lord would not allow his beloved companion to come to harm if he could help it. Her mission was simply to go in and kill him, or at least keep him distracted while the Daleks formulated an attack.

The Doctor fought down another wave of fresh anger at the species. That they viewed life so _lightly_…

"I _am _a Dalek," Rose snapped, interrupting his train of thought. "I am just as much a Dalek as any other. And when they find you—"

Her voice was changing, turning from the clipped tones of her emulated species to the more familiar accents of the Rose he knew. This pleased him; even so, he cut her short. "They're not coming," he told her. "You know they wouldn't. Risk who knows how many of themselves to save the life of a human hiding inside a lump of metal?"

Rose bristled. Perhaps making her angry wasn't the best way of getting her to give in, but there was a kind of desperation lighting behind her eyes now. Maybe, he thought. Maybe this would be easier than he thought.

"Then I will die," she decided.

"I won't let you."

"You have no choice."

The Doctor started retreating back towards the door. "I _will _reverse the process, Rose," he said, and exited before he could hear her reply.

-BAD WOLF-

…Yay update! :D Distressingly short—sorry about that—but I'm still trying to get back into the "Oh, yeah, I'm writing this" mode… So Yeah.

Be well!


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